Didem Sarikaya
Didem Sarikaya, PhD, studied cell growth and reproductive behavior as a graduate student in Harvard’s Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Program. As a postdoc, she branched into genetic studies of natural variants on adult health, metabolism, and sleep. During her postdoctoral work at UC Davis, she was heavily involved in Genetics Society of America as Co-Chair of their Career Development Subcommittee and an Adviser to the Board on advocating for investment in young scientists and strategic planning of the society’s goals. After completing her postdoc, Didem entered industry as a Scientific Project Manager at Genedata and is now currently a Senior Product Manager (Software) at 10x Genomics. In addition to her many accomplishments, she has been awarded the NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Can you describe your academic and professional background? What path led you to pursue this field?
I did my PhD in evolutionary developmental biology, which touched upon multiple fields like genetics, cell biology, ecology, and evolution and I really enjoyed the intersection of these disciplines. I did my postdoctoral research in evolution genetics and cell biology, where I studied how cells communicate with each other from a quantitative perspective. I had spent over 5 years working as a postdoc and was gearing towards an academic career. Right as I was applying for faculty roles and preparing for interviews, the COVID lockdown happened, which resulted in faculty interview cancellations. During the lockdown, I reflected on my career and determined that I most enjoyed strategizing, talking to people, and facilitating conversations, and that I could be happier in a non-research role in industry. My first role out of academia was a project management position at a software company, and am now a software product manager at 10X Genomics.
How did you find this particular position, and what was the hiring process like?
When I started looking for industry jobs, I applied to titles that were appealing to my interests. This included project, program (managing several projects), operations (internal role helping within the company), alliance (business partnerships, relationship management), and product manager (managing the development of a software). I did over 20 informational interviews with scientists in these roles to get a better understanding of what these positions are. After having done a relatively long postdoc, people often assumed I would be better suited as a researcher and not in a managerial role and I leveraged what I learned in the informational interviews to highlight my transferable skills. At my first job, I focused on customer relations and developed a key skill set of facilitating conversations and running effective meetings. After a while, I missed interacting with science and wanted to contribute to developing products which led me to transition to my work at 10x Genomics.
The usual job interview process for the types of roles I applied for involved speaking to various team members and giving a presentation of my own research experience and how my knowledge and training aligns well with the company’s product. For example with 10X, I was interviewing for a role that would help build the spatial biology software, and I discussed my microscopy experiments, developmental cell biology research, and familiarity with different softwares to visualize data. There was also a practical component where we re-enacted solving problems with the design and engineer teams. Sometimes this involves guiding a team member through solving a difficult problem and making a decision. Examples of discussion points would include feature prioritization, timeline implementation, and consequences of each action. If you are doing a product management interview, I strongly recommend you read up on the software, download it and test it out if possible,, know the competitive landscape, and establish a preliminary opinion about the product space. This type of prep work goes a long way!
Can you tell us about your current responsibilities? What is a typical day or week like in your role, and what do you enjoy about it?
Product management is a generalist’s dream job. A day of a product manager could be anywhere from discussing technical challenges with the engineering team, speaking with customers to understand what to prioritize in the software, running meetings and aligning on what everyone is doing to get to the finish line, and speaking with the marketing team to create promotional materials for the software. I get to work with our R&D teams and commercial teams, tackle customer calls and contribute to building a new product. The projects at 10X Genomics cover a lot of different scientific fields, and getting to learn about entirely new fields is very fun.
What are some of the challenging aspects of your job? Is there anything you wish you had known about your job or industry before joining?
One of the challenges of doing many different tasks on different projects is context switching. You have to keep track of what you are doing, and why, meticulously to make sure things aren’t slipping through the crack. Another challenge can be gathering information and coordinating across teams. To be successful in moving a product forward to making a decision, one has to be proactive in gathering information to avoid information glitches or misunderstandings.
Fortunately, I was able to interview many people in different non-research industry roles over the course of 2 years during my time on the GSA Career Development Subcommittee, which gave me exposure to life in industry. Being able to learn about other career paths can take time to absorb, so I recommend grad students to talk to scientists in different career paths early and regularly to understand what life outside of the academy could be like.
Do you have any professional plans for the future? What are some future career paths that could open up for someone in your position, 5-10 years down the road?
For Product management, and any industry role, the progression is different depending on if you want to be an individual contributor (often referred to as IC) or management. Essentially you can progress into higher titles in product management (Senior, Staff etc) and take on bigger and more complex product challenges. Alternatively, you can go into management (Group product manager, Director, Head of product) and oversee a team. I’m one year into being a product management, so I’m still exploring what each of these options mean and which area I would fit best in.
What’s changing in your industry? Are there any future trends we should be aware of?
I think there are a lot of exciting opportunities for scientists to contribute to software, and I am seeing more scientists taking on roles as product managers. I think it’s an exciting space to be in. Another shift that is interesting to watch is the work location flexibility, and how different companies are tackling it. While I really enjoy working from home, there are aspects of in-person meetings that accelerate decision making and collaboration, and I try to meet with people in person when I have the chance.
What activities, internships, or organizations would you recommend someone get involved with to help them break into this field?
To be honest, the best first step is to get a job in industry. Sometimes grad students who have decided they will go into industry seem to feel pressure to do a postdoc, and I think that’s very unnecessary, unless there is something specific you want to learn. Having a technical role in industry or working with software in some capacity can help you break into product management roles, which is what I did. In these cases, being proactive and taking on strategic activities can help you move towards a product management role. There are also great resources, like Women in Product, that have public resources to learn about the role.
Is it common for people in your field to have a scientific/academic background (i.e. have PhDs)? Can you think of any advantages or disadvantages someone with a PhD might experience while pursuing or working in your field?
The main advantage of having an advanced degree and scientific research training is that you can figure out the science more quickly and use your research experience to empathize with the user. It also helps with distilling complex science and communicating it to team members. A strength of the teams I work with is having a mixture of perspectives and members from various backgrounds. A lot of what we do requires critical thinking, different soft skills and business analytics experience. It’s really important to be able to collaborate and work well with different personalities in order to empower the team to generate ideas and leadership strategies.
Do you have any final words of advice for those navigating these career questions? Is there anything you would have done differently given what you know now?
Invest the time to get to know yourself! We’re often rushed to get the next accomplishment, next award, next paper… and it can be easy to neglect paying attention to yourself. In reality, you need to know yourself to be effective, regardless of what line of work you do. Some things to consider are not only what you like, but also how you react to situations, what environments you work best within, and defining your personal boundaries. What do you need to stay balanced? What activities help you reset your mind so you can approach problems from a fresh perspective? Knowing the answer to these things go a very long way in making you happier, as a proxy, making those around you happier.
